2017 year end review

I recently wrapped up the 2017 version of my annual Year End Review. With 8,000 lines of code, 7,000 words, and 50+ hand written components, it’s a very large side project which I re-invent each year. It has always been a challenge in design, creativity and articulation. This year, in line with my goal of becoming a JavaScript developer, I decided to put a much heavier emphasis on the technical challenge than I have previously.

For example, every page loads text from JSON files, making a cleaner separation between code and content. And rather than manually repeating HTML elements, I programmatically construct the relevant page sections.

Nearly every page includes interactive features and mini games. Several connect to a Firebase database, reading and writing values.

Cool Features

• Firebase Hosting and realtime NoSQL database
• Hand drawn vectors and CSS animation on every page
• Code organized (mostly) in accordance with the 7-1 pattern
• Victory.js chart library

What I Learned

• Deploying to Firebase Hosting is easy. So is connecting to their NoSQL database.
• Deploying to AWS is sometimes… challenging for beginners. I was unable to justify tackling its complexity for this project when I knew of friendlier options.
• Version control is useful for organization and archiving, even with a single developer. It enforces good discipline and made it easy to work on multiple machines.
• I really don’t know React yet. I made the site work, but I have a long way to go before fully grasping ES6, and good, modern object oriented JavaScript practices.
• Playback of CSS animations is still not well optimized. Infinite animation loops will burn your CPU to the ground.
• High fidelity design is hard when you’re utilizing modern features and supporting a wide range of mobile, desktop, and high DPI devices + browsers. The work is not_hard_but it is tedious. My propriety was developing for Chrome on desktop at medium DPI while being mindful of the need to accommodate everything else. That worked pretty well, except for when it didn’t.